Tuesday, November 12, 2013

Logan Buries The Lede The Truth

“We end our broadcast tonight with a correction,” Logan said this Sunday. She used Jones’s real name, Dylan Davies. when an incident report surfaced. It told a different story about what he did the night of the attack.” Davies, she said, “insisted the story he told us was not only accurate, it was the same story he told the F.B.I. when they interviewed him.” When “60 Minutes” learned on Thursday that, in fact, the F.B.I. report “was different from what he told us, we realized we had been misled, and it was a mistake to include him in our report. For that we are very sorry. The most important thing to every person at ‘60 Minutes’ is the truth. And the truth is, we made a mistake.”

This is, in many ways, an odd statement and an understatement. To say that the incident report “surfaced” and told “a different story” isn’t quite adequate: Karen DeYoung, of the Washington Post, obtained it, and it was apparently already among the papers turned over to Congress. The discrepancies extended to Davies’s location that night: he was not in the compound at all but, rather, in his “beach side villa.” (“We could not get anywhere near,” the report read.)

"After the broadcast, she said, 'questions arose about whether his account was true....'" Exactly so.

So eager was CBS to spread Davies' conservative bullshit that it performed no investigation into whether that account was true. CBS and Logan never raised any questions before broadcasting Davies' fairy tale.

And who exactly would raise questions about Davies' account on 60 MinutesBEFORE HE APPEARED ON THE FUCKING PROGRAM AND GAVE THAT FUCKING ACCOUNT? People who had never seen that account because they didn't have access to the interview foorage, or the bullshit book CBS was publishing? If you're going to broadcast bullshit, saying that no one called you on your bullshit before you broadcast it is neither a defense nor an apology. It's an admission of gross incompetence.

60 Minutes preferred to turn a doughy-looking mope into an action hero just to keep the Benghazi lies alive. Until they clean house, 60 Minutes is no more credible that NewsBusters or Breitbart News.

4 comments:

"60 Minutes" has been on a downward trajectory for some time. Maybe at no other time in the program's history, there's been real meat out there to probe and dissect, but even Dan Rather, in the face of 9/11, was saying that he'd smartly salute the President and do his part.

The entire Benghazi story, as produced by the "60 Minutes" team, was about the government somehow failed to protect its valuable national security state assets, not about why we put their security in the hands of civilian corporate contractors, or why we thought an embassy in a war-torn, completely unstable country was an absolute necessity (no one wanted to just come out and say that the CIA determines these things, not the State Dept.), a country that, incidentally, came completely unglued because we wanted it unglued, because we arrogantly thought we could remake it in our image, and now all we have is pieces of pieces. That was the bigger story, which mostly went unreported.